Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Some time in early 1972, the MRF devised an operation to discover, via forensics evidence, where the IRA’s bomb-making factories in Belfast were and who was involved, or at least that is what the British told their American counterparts some thirty-five years later, as the US Military attempted to quell an insurgency in Iraq that made the violence in Northern Ireland seem pretty tame. The story was told in 2008 by a US Special Operations officer to Tom Ricks, the military correspondent of the Washington Post:

  I attended a briefing at the CI [Counter-Intelligence] Center a year ago and one of the speakers was a former British SAS officer who worked Belfast for ten years. He provided some fascinating insights into their operations and, specifically, some of the ‘out-of-the-box’ methods they utilised to collect and target the IRA, PIRA [Provisional Irish Republican Army], Gerry Adams and their sympathizers. One of the most interesting operations was the laundromat. Having lost many troops and civilians to bombings, the Brits decided they needed to determine who was making the bombs and where they were being manufactured.

  One bright fellow recommended they operate a laundry and when asked ‘what the hell he was talking about’, he explained the plan and it was incorporated – to much success. The plan was simple: build a laundry and staff it with locals and a few of their own. The laundry would then send out ‘color-coded’ special discount tickets, to the effect of ‘get two loads for the price of one’, etc. The color coding was matched to specific streets and thus when someone brought in their laundry, it was easy to determine the general location from which a city map was coded.

  While the laundry was indeed being washed, pressed and dry-cleaned, it had one additional cycle – every garment, sheet, glove, pair of pants, was first sent through an analyzer, located in the basement, that checked for bomb-making residue. The analyzer was disguised as just another piece of the laundry equipment; good OPSEC [operational security]. Within a few weeks, multiple positives had shown up, indicating the ingredients of bomb residue, and Intelligence had determined which areas of the city were involved. To narrow their target list, [the laundry] simply sent out more specific coupons [numbered] to all houses in the area, and before long they had good addresses.33

  The British account, delivered courtesy of America’s premier daily newspaper, concluded: ‘During the entire operation, no one was injured or killed.’ Whatever was claimed about the alleged success of the ‘laundromat’ operation or the accuracy of some details, this last statement was certainly not true. The laundry described was in fact the Four Square Laundry which operated from premises in the heart of Loyalist South Belfast. Customers did not bring their dirty clothes into the laundry to be washed but rather vans bearing the Four Square Laundry logo would tour Nationalist districts of the city offering a cut-price service, collecting dirty laundry and returning clean clothes door to door. Colour-coded coupons would therefore not be needed to identify customers. Whether gathering forensic evidence was the principal activity of the Four Square operation is also questionable. The van had a hidden compartment in the roof, large enough to accommodate two people and was used, the IRA discovered, to facilitate surveillance of IRA suspects.

  The Four Square Laundry operation was, the IRA later claimed, the tip of a large intelligence-gathering iceberg created by the MRF. On 2 October 1972, after a painstaking counter-intelligence operation that had lasted some six months or more, the IRA struck. The outcome of the IRA attack is disputed to this day. Only one British fatality has ever been acknowledged by the military and the IRA’s claim that it dealt a much larger blow to the MRF remains unproven. The one admitted death occurred as the Four Square van made calls in the Twinbrook area of West Belfast that midmorning. Another van drew alongside and at least one gunman raked the vehicle, and its roof space, with automatic fire, killing Sapper Edward Stuart.34 A colleague, a female soldier called ‘Jane’, escaped and was helped by local people who thought the van had been attacked by Loyalists. ‘Jane’ was from Coleraine in County Derry and her local accent enabled her to chat safely to women in housing estates such as Twinbrook and to pick up local gossip and possibly valuable snippets of information. The IRA claimed that four other MRF operatives were shot dead that day, two of whom were killed when its members attacked a massage parlour on the Antrim Road in North Belfast that was staffed by English prostitutes and used as an MRF front. A city-centre office allegedly maintained by the MRF was also raided but found to be empty. None of these deaths has ever been conceded by the British, a failure the IRA has always put down to their unwillingness to admit such a bloody setback.

  Brendan Hughes was responsible for the downfall of the Four Square Laundry. His suspicions about a missing Volunteer from D Company, Seamus Wright, slowly unravelled the MRF plot, uncovering in the process another IRA double agent, Kevin McKee from Ballymurphy. He won the two men’s confidence and persuaded them to tell all they knew about what the MRF was doing. Hughes was then on the staff of D Company but by the time the investigation began to get serious, in the weeks after the 1972 ceasefire and ‘Bloody Friday’, he had moved on to the staff of the Second Battalion while Gerry Adams was now Belfast Commander and took charge of the counter-assault against the MRF. Hughes wanted to move against the laundry operation straight away but Adams overruled him, saying that a cautious, careful probe would reveal much more about the British operation.

  In the wake of the attack on the MRF, Wright and McKee were killed and their bodies dumped in secret graves, probably somewhere in South Armagh. Until now, and Brendan Hughes’s disclosure about the killing of Joe Linskey, it was thought they were the IRA’s first such victims. They were disappeared ostensibly to spare their families embarrassment and shame. Having an informer in the family carries a special stigma in Ireland and all the more so when the victims’ families were as well known for their Republican fervour and involvement, as were the immediate Wright and McKee families. While sparing the families this ordeal was perhaps an understandable motive in 1972, that attitude gave way to what was arguably a much greater cruelty: keeping the truth from the families for decades, long after it was necessary. It was not until March 1999, twenty-seven years later, that the IRA admitted not only that Wright and McKee had been killed but that they had been disappeared as well. If it had not been for the pressures brought about by the peace process it is feasible the IRA would never have come clean about the disappeared. There is another possible reason why Wright and McKee were disappeared. Erasing Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee from the Four Square Laundry story kept hidden the British success in penetrating the Belfast IRA, while enhancing the triumph and achievement of those who had dealt the MRF such a heavy blow.

  As for Brendan Hughes, it is clear from his interviews with Boston College that he carried a burden of guilt about the fate meted out to Wright and McKee. They had told him all they knew about the MRF because he had given them his word that they would not be killed. When they were shot and dumped in a secret hole, both they and he were betrayed.

  Seamy Wright was a D Company Volunteer … One of the Dogs … he went missing and we knew he must have been involved in something. He was married into the Hickey family who were central to … D Company. Patsy [Hickey] was involved, the whole family was involved and so were Mary and Eileen – they were a major Republican family in the Lower Falls. Eileen became O/C of Armagh [women’s] jail and Patsy served a life sentence for something he did not do. So when Seamy Wright went missing he sent for his wife. It turned out that he was in England and his wife went over, met him there, came back and I met her in the Hickey household in Leeson Street. Seamy wanted out of the situation he was in. He was under the control of British Intelligence and they had him in a house, I believe, outside London but he wanted guarantees that [if he came back] he’d be OK. I gave the guarantee to his wife and he escaped his handlers and got out of England. That was his story. We met him in a house in Bombay Street, talked to him and convinced him that he was [going to be] OK. We then formally interrogated him and got t
he whole rundown on the Four Square Laundry situation, that it was a British Intelligence network [they had] set up. They had a base on the Donegall Road, a laundry … in the Village area, the Protestant part of the Donegall Road. They would travel round the areas, going to specific houses to pick up laundry and what they did was do forensics tests on the clothes. Seamy Wright was able to tell us about this whole network. They had an office – you can actually see it from here [Hughes’s flat in Divis Tower] – in College Square and a massage parlour on the Antrim Road. He gave us a list of names of those who were involved with him in this undercover operation, three of them were IRA Volunteers; two from Ballymurphy – it was mainly a Belfast set-up. The IRA had been heavily penetrated – they had Seamy Wright who was in D Company, probably the most active company in the North. They had infiltrated Ballymurphy, another very active company – they had Kevin ‘Beaky’ McKee and another Volunteer as well.§ Wright was able to tell us about how much ‘Beaky’ loved his involvement with this undercover squad. They carried their own weapons. They had shoulder-holsters. They trained in Holywood Barracks where they had firing ranges and they were trained in anti-interrogation techniques and so forth. So the Seamy Wright thing expanded into a Belfast operation which brought in Gerry, and Gerry took control of the whole operation. I mean, I was prepared to move right away against the van itself … but his attitude was ‘hold back, hold back, hold back – more information, more information, more information’, you know. So ‘Beaky’ McKee was pulled in and we interrogated him as well. It had started off as a D Company operation but became a Brigade operation … and after getting as much intelligence as we thought we could get, we moved against it. You have to understand that McKee and Wright believed they had been given immunity and [afterwards] they were taken away across the border where they were held for weeks and weeks. The order was given for them to be put down. I didn’t give the order and I felt betrayed … There was no purpose in killing them; it was pure revenge … I don’t know who gave the order for them to be executed … I can’t say for sure who took the decision. I know they were supposed to be dead and weeks later we found out they were not dead and the order was reinforced. Apparently the people who were holding them, now this is hearsay on my behalf … the people who were holding them liked them and couldn’t kill them and so people were sent from Belfast to do the actual execution. Seamy Wright’s sister was a very prominent Republican and the sad thing about it is that for years I knew the two of them were dead but I couldn’t tell anybody. I was in prison in Long Kesh when Eileen came to visit me; her sister was Seamy Wright’s wife. They hadn’t been told a thing so I took it upon myself to tell Eileen that Seamy was dead. The same thing with the McKee family … they came to me to ask what had happened and although I genuinely could not say for definite that they were dead, I believed that both of them were.

  In the hierarchy of the disappeared, there is little doubt that the most disturbing, controversial and poignant killing of this type carried out by the Belfast IRA during this time was that of Jean McConville, who went to her secret grave some time in December 1972, very possibly around the same time as Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee. The disappearance of Jean McConville has assumed such a dark status because of her wretched circumstances. She was a widow struggling by herself to bring up ten children, the oldest a sick, hospitalised daughter of twenty, who herself died not long after her mother’s disappearance, and the youngest six-year-old twin boys. She was a Protestant who had married a Catholic ex-soldier, converted to his religion, lived in East Belfast until Loyalists intimidated the family out of their home and ended up in Divis Flats, perhaps the most squalid and dangerous public-housing estate in all of Europe at the time. One night, some time between the last two days of November 1972 and 7 December, masked men and women took her away from her flat in St Jude’s Walk, delivered her to a crowd of up to twenty people, who were armed and wearing balaclavas, and she vanished, never to be seen alive again. Her surviving nine children were separated and six were admitted to care. That such a woman had gone missing in circumstances as disturbing as these, and a family destroyed, would be enough to make the Jean McConville case a cause célèbre but there has also been great controversy over why she was killed in such a way.

  In March 1999 the IRA admitted that it had killed and secretly buried nine people during the course of the Troubles, all in the 1970s, and offered to help locate their graves. The statement came during a moment of crisis in the peace process. The Good Friday Agreement had been successfully negotiated the previous year but a number of obstacles still stood in the way of implementing the power-sharing government that lay at the centre of the deal, most notably the refusal of the IRA to begin decommissioning its weapons. Towards the end of March, the deadline for devolution was extended and crisis talks with British premier Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart, Bertie Ahern, were convened in Northern Ireland, during which the IRA’s statement on the disappeared was made public. Some saw the move as an effort to deflect pressure on the weapons issue but on the day it was released the British and Irish governments granted immunity to anyone providing information about the whereabouts of the disappeareds’ remains, a sign that the Provos and the governments were co-ordinating their approach to the issue in the face of growing pressure. Families of the missing had been campaigning for the truth for some time and when President Clinton gave them his support, signalling what the United States, a partner in the peace process, wished to see happen, the satisfactory resolution of the issue was thus elevated to something of a test of the IRA’s peace-process bona fides.

  In that, and a subsequent statement, the IRA said that Jean McConville was killed because she was an informer and that she had admitted so at the time. This was an allegation that her family, especially her daughter Helen, who was fifteen when her mother disappeared, and her husband Seamus McKendry angrily denied. They maintained that she had been killed because she had gone to the aid of a British soldier who had been shot near her flat in Divis by the IRA, that her crime was to show compassion to a fellow human being who happened to be wearing a British uniform. Their narrative depicted the IRA in the worst possible light and created even more sympathy for the family.

  Although the IRA had given the impression that it knew where the bodies of the missing had been hidden, this was far from the case. A cross-border commission established to co-ordinate efforts to find the bodies had, by 2003, been able to locate just three of the nine victims. In Jean McConville’s case, the IRA had given a location that was not precise: a beach near Carlingford Lough in County Louth in the Irish Republic, a picturesque spot at the southern foot of the Mourne mountains. Repeated searches of the area had produced nothing. Then, in August 2003, a walker discovered her remains on Shelling Hill beach some distance from the spot identified by the IRA. A storm the previous spring had washed away part of a car park and roadway constructed on top of her unmarked grave and eventually erosion exposed her body.35 An autopsy established that she had been killed by a single gunshot fired into the back of her head, the classic hallmark of an IRA execution.

  Confirmation that Jean McConville had been killed and dis appeared by the IRA, together with growing public disquiet about the case, was the spur for an official British inquiry carried out by the new Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan, at the behest of two of McConville’s children. In July and again in August 2006, O’Loan pronounced her verdict. While her inquiry centred on whether the police had properly investigated McConville’s disappearance at the time – she concluded that they hadn’t – O’Loan also dealt with the vexed question of the reason for her death. Her conclusion left the matter unresolved, vindicating neither the IRA nor her family. ‘As part of our investigation’, O’Loan pronounced, ‘we have looked very extensively at all the intelligence available at the time. There is no evidence that Mrs McConville gave information to the police, the military or the Security Service. She was not an informant.’ But O’Loan also discounted the f
amily’s explanation, that she had been killed after she had helped a wounded soldier; the only soldier shot around the time she disappeared was wounded after she had been abducted. Some of her children had a memory of her aiding a wounded soldier, she said, but that had been in January 1972, ten months before she was taken away by the IRA. If this had angered the IRA, it had taken an inordinately long time, ten months or so, for them to take their revenge.

  Gerry Adams had by this stage become enmeshed in the Jean McConville saga, formally by virtue of the fact that at the time of her disappearance he had been Brigade Commander of the IRA, the figure at whose metaphorical desk the buck stopped. Under pressure to respond to demands that Republicans should come clean about the affair, Adams met McConville’s daughter Helen and her husband, Seamus McKendry, in 2000 and denied all knowledge to them about her disappearance. During one exchange with McKendry, Adams had told the couple that he could not have been involved as he had been interned at the time. According to McKendry, ‘He told Helen and I: “Thank God I was in prison when she disappeared.”’36 In fact Adams was very much at large when Jean McConville was abducted and was not arrested and interned until July 1973, more than six months after her death. None the less, the efforts by Gerry Adams and his colleagues to distance the Sinn Fein leader from the McConville scandal have been largely successful because no other participant in Jean McConville’s abduction and disappearance has come forward publicly to say what actually did happen. Until now.